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The 4-Hour Flight and Fiery Re-Entry That Could Give NASA Its Mojo Back Page 24 November 2014 ORION The 4-hour flight and fiery re-entry that could give NASA its mojo back page 24 Proactive on cybersecurity/page 30 Earth-observing Sentinels/page 34 Aireon’s Thoma on airliner surveillance page 22 A PUBLICATIONPUBLICATION OFOF THETHE AMERICANAMERICAN INSTITUTEINSTITUTE OFOF AERONAUTICSAERONAUTICS ANDAND ASTRONAUTICSASTRONAUTICS Preparing to install Orion’s heat shield at Kennedy Space Center in anticipation of its Dec. 4 liftoff. 26 AEROSPACE AMERICA/NOVEMBER 2014 TIME TO FLY If NASA is going to deliver astronauts to Mars or an asteroid, Lockheed Martin is designing the crew capsules that will take them there. The Orion project has been unfolding for years in board rooms and cleanrooms, but things will get real on Dec. 4 when an unmanned test version blasts off from Florida. Natalia Mironova describes the road to Exploration Flight Test-1 and the technical challenges to come. f all goes as planned, an unmanned could become a problem as NASA closes in Orion multipurpose crew vehicle will on the first crewed launch in 2021. splash down in the Pacific Ocean For Lockheed and NASA, the stakes on southwest of San Diego on Dec. 4, hav- Dec. 4 could not be higher. A smooth mis- ing ventured 3,600 miles into space, sion would be a confidence builder that Ifarther than any crew vehicle has gone since could shore up faith in the U.S.’ decision to the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. This early shelve its desire for a single-stage-to-orbit version of an Orion capsule will be coming space plane in favor of a simpler capsule back hot because of a trajectory designed to and rocket approach. partially mimic a deep-space mission. The A maxim among engineers is that tests craft will plow into the atmosphere at 6.8 like EFT-1 are designed to find problems. No miles per second — that’s 80 to 85 percent of matter how things go, Orion advocates are the velocity of a trip back from the neigh- confident they’ll learn whatever technical borhood of the moon, where NASA plans to lessons will be required to ultimately suc- This artist concept shows Orion park an asteroid someday. The velocity will ceed. “If we do EFT-1 and the heat shield and its upper stage as they will appear in the Exploration Flight Test-1 mission. beat the 4.7 miles per second re-entry speed of the shuttle orbiters. The result will be melting-pot temperatures of 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit around some parts of Orion. To survive this, Orion will enter base first like an Apollo capsule and it will be protected in part by an updated version of the same protective foamlike Avcoat mate- rial that shielded the Apollo capsules. If following the Apollo template — but with a capsule 30 percent larger — was sup- posed to make it easy for NASA and Lock- heed to get to Exploration Flight Test-1, that has not been the case. Textron, the Avcoat provider, had to repair cracks discovered in NASA Orion’s heat shield in 2013 after a curing pro- cracks on us and we end up having a prob- cess. Lockheed Martin and NASA engineers lem because the heat shield failed, that’s ac- also had to change the shape of the capsule’s tually a good test because then we know launch abort aeroshell to reduce the aerody- the limits. We’ll have enough instrumenta- namic noise astronauts would hear during an tion on there to be able to understand what abort. Then there is the issue of spacecraft happened,” says Dan Dumbacher, a former mass: The EFT-1 version of Orion is within its NASA deputy associate administrator for ex- mass limit, but the Government Accountabil- ploration systems development and now a ity Office cautioned earlier this year that mass professor at Purdue University. By Natalia Mironova AEROSPACE AMERICA/NOVEMBER 2014 25 back shell, which is possible because the back shell won’t be subject to as much heat. As with everything on Orion, mass was a big driver in the decision to use a combi- nation of these technologies. The heat shield’s foamlike Avcoat filler is fairly light, but the honeycomb framework and the tita- nium structure required to support it will bring the heat shield’s weight to 4,000 pounds — that’s on average 39 pounds per cubic foot compared with the tiles on the exterior of the shuttle orbiter that weigh 13 pounds per cubic foot. Using both technologies — Avcoat and the tiles — made for a lighter overall thermal protection system. “If you are lighter you Sources: NASA, Lockheed Martin, US Navy can go further for the same amount of pro- pellant,” explains Price. Launch illustrations by Anatoly Zak Relying on a familiar heat-shield mate- Survival plan rial had its advantages, but it also has The attraction of Apollo was the shape’s brought its share of challenges. Avcoat is a proven ability to handle high-speed re-en- mixture of epoxy and phenolic resins with tries. “We did look hard at other ideas, but it several types of glass fibers and phenolic turns out the physics are the same and the microballoons inside a glass-reinforced hon- shape still makes sense for this kind of mis- eycomb structure. On Orion, this is bonded sion,” says NASA’s Mark Geyer, the Orion to a titanium framework covered in carbon program manager. Once the engineers de- fiber sheets up to 2 inches thick. GAO in its termined that they would be using the basic 2014 “Assessments of Large-Scale Projects,” capsule shape of Apollo, they could draw on cautioned that thermal expansion during a actual flight data from the Apollo landings. flight could cause cracks to develop be- Engineers “have the benefit of all of that tween the “ablative material and the under- previous history — 12 or so full-scale re-en- lying shield structure.” tries,” says Larry Price, Lockheed’s deputy Textron says it used “Apollo proven program manager for Orion. techniques” to fix thermal expansion cracks At the top of EFT-1’s list of test objec- that developed during curing, and that no tives will be to evaluate its thermal protec- cracking was found after stress tests on the tion system, which borrows from Apollo and Avcoat and its carrier structure. also the space shut- tle program. When Orion plows into the atmosphere, it will be protected by a dish-shaped, multilayered heat shield covered by Avcoat, an updated recipe of the abla- tive, or meltable, material that pro- tected the Apollo capsules. Unlike Apollo, Orion will have shuttle-de- rived protective tiles instead of Av- coat on its conical Sources: NASA, Lockheed Martin, US Navy 26 AEROSPACE AMERICA/NOVEMBER 2014 withstand extreme pressure loads. Even with all the efforts to shave mass, the GAO cautions that Orion is 2,800 pounds over the cur- rent maximum take- off limit of 73,500 pounds for the next Orion launch, an un- manned flight called Exploration Mis- sion-1 planned for 2017. “The mass of the spacecraft re- Sources: NASA, Lockheed Martin, US Navy mains a top program risk,” GAO says in its annual assessment. A separate concern is that micro-cracks EM-1 will be the first flight of Orion on the could develop within the Avcoat because of new Space Launch System rockets, and GAO the long-term exposure to deep space. says NASA plans to solve the mass problem These micro-cracks ultimately were not a by relying on the performance of SLS and problem for Apollo or later missions, but adjusting the load, mission duration and size Orion will be in the cold of space longer of the crew on future crewed flights. and will re-enter hotter. Lockheed says it is fully aware of the Lockheed doesn’t expect micro-crack- mass issue. “For Exploration Mission-1, we ing to be a problem during EFT-1 because, have a design that closes on mass, however at just over four hours, the flight won’t be we have identified some threats to that plan. long enough to subject Orion to extreme Those threats are typical for a spacecraft de- cold, and the company says it is looking at velopment program and we do not anticipate “potential modifications” to prevent micro- any issue meeting the mass requirement,” cracking on longer missions. But it’s impos- says Carol Martin, Lockheed Martin’s Orion sible to perfectly recreate deep space in a Exploration Mission director, by email. lab, so engineers will still be interested in inspecting the shield for signs of cracks after Whisking astronauts to safety the December test flight. “We want to gather Re-entry is risky, but so is launch. A detach- data in flight and see how Avcoat performs at 4,000-nautical-mile entry as well as future flights and determine if the cracking is a problem or not,” says Price, who describes Avcoat as a brittle material. “There is a strong belief that as the ma- terial melts and ablates away, it would fill any of those micro cracks,” he says. In the end, the team had to compromise to pick the best thermal protection material that was structurally solid and worked within the weight limitations. “Nothing is perfect.” Weight watching Mass limits are hot on the team’s mind too. Orion’s pressure hull, for example, is made from aluminum lithium alloy — the same ma- terial used to build the shuttle’s external tanks — because it is lightweight yet able to Sources: NASA, Lockheed Martin, US Navy AEROSPACE AMERICA/NOVEMBER 2014 2725 able system of solid rocket motors and an aeroshell will ride atop Orion during ascent and will pull the capsule away from an exploding or out of control Space Launch System vehicle.
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